93-year-old sentenced to jail

At an age when most men are in their graves, 93-year-old Clifford L. Schackel was in court Friday for sentencing as a child molester.

Two burly jail transport officers brought the defendant into court in a wheelchair. His swept-back hair was white; his jail jumpsuit, bright orange.

Schackel pleaded guilty Feb. 7 to third-degree child molestation for abusing a 6-year-old girl on several occasions. His wife, Ruth Schackel, caught him in the act last September and reported the crime.

Defense attorney Rob Cossey sat next to his client and needed to raise his voice to be heard. He had to “translate” when Superior Court Judge Michael Price addressed Schackel.

“Is there anything you want to tell the judge?” Cossey relayed to Schackel.

“I’m leaving it all up to him,” Schackel murmured, his body trembling. “I think he’s got good judgment.”

Schackel’s two gray-haired sons, Gary and Doug, told Price they loved their father and thought he did a good job of rearing them. His wife urged Price not to hold Schackel’s apparent lack of remorse against him.

“He’s a man that doesn’t say he’s sorry,” Ruth Schackel said. “All our married life, that’s the way he’s been.”

She blamed herself for failing to tell anyone in 1986 that she had discovered her husband had already committed a similar offense.

“I should have left him then, turned him in then, but I didn’t do it,” Ruth Schackel said.

She said she and her husband have been married 41 years. He is a former marketing manager who worked 31 years for Coca-Cola in Spokane and had never before been convicted of a crime.

Schackel faced a standard sentence of up to a year in jail. Cossey and Deputy Prosecutor John Love jointly recommended a six-month sentence, but Price refused to go along.

The judge said he had “serious concerns” that Schackel would re-offend. He noted that Schackel claimed to investigators that the 6-year-old victim initiated sexual contact with him. The girl may be scarred for life, Price said.

Price handed down the maximum one-year sentence, with credit for 71 days already served. Since his arrest, Schackel has been confined to the infirmary of the Airway Heights Corrections Center.

He could be the oldest convict serving time behind bars in Washington.

Although no figures were available Friday for the age of inmates serving time in county jails, Schackel is three years older than the oldest inmate currently locked up in the state prison system, a 90-year-old from Chelan County who was 79 when he was convicted of attempted murder, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Senior court employees in Spokane believe Schackel may be the county’s oldest criminal defendant.

“I have never heard of any that old,” said Ann Prideaux, the county’s most senior court employee. Prideaux has been on the job for 44 years and currently is the court reporter for Superior Court Judge Robert Austin.

Austin is the second most senior judge, with 23 years on the bench, and he also had never heard of a defendant as old as Schackel. Nor had Judge Neal Rielly, who is in his 17th year as a commissioner and judge.

According to actuarial tables published by the state Insurance Commissioner’s Office, Schackel can expect to live only 31/2 more years.